


Where the Wild Things Are

by stover



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Centaurs, Fae & Fairies, M/M, Monster Sheith Zine 2018, Mythical Beings & Creatures, The Shape of Sheith Zine 2018
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-19
Updated: 2020-05-19
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:47:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24263077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stover/pseuds/stover
Summary: While on the road with his mom, Keith sticks his nose where he shouldn’t and disturbs a forest where a half-lion, half-horse creature hunts for sport.
Relationships: Keith & Krolia (Voltron), Keith/Shiro (Voltron)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 45





	Where the Wild Things Are

**Author's Note:**

> First published in the 2018 issue of [The Shape of Sheith](https://monstersheithzine.tumblr.com/post/176069589660/the-shape-of-sheith-a-monster-sheith-zine-is), a monster sheith zine.

“All set?” his mom asks.

Keith steps back from the trunk of his mom’s car to look over the two duffels he’s hauled inside. “Yeah, I guess.” He moves to shut the trunk. 

His mom catches the trunk as it swings down. The look on her face makes him feel like he’s five years old and getting caught climbing up the kitchen counter for the sugar bowl. “I’m serious,” she says. “I’m not turning back because you left your phone. Especially if we’ve gone through tolls. Check again.”

Keith shrugs and rolls his eyes. “Relax,” he says, fishing his phone out the pocket of his jeans. “It’s right here. See? And look,” Keith pries open his drawstring bag. “I’ve got my headphones, my charger, my wallet…” He stops abruptly. Then he scowls. “One sec,” he mutters, yanking his bag shut and throwing it on his back. “I forgot my wallet.”

His mom’s barking laughter chases after him as he runs back to his dad’s apartment. It catches him off guard, making him trip on the steps up the brownstone. Hearing it is a thrill, because he hasn’t heard his mom laugh like that in a long time. It’s the sound his mom made when he won his first soccer match in the second grade—and when his dad finally told her that he, too, thought they needed a divorce.

To this day, Keith has no idea why it ‘needed’ to happen. From the way they act whenever they’re in a room together, his parents clearly still love each other. So, he wonders, why did they split? Was it their jobs? Was it about money, or about taxes?

Was it him?

Keith finds his wallet in the exact same place he left his phone last summer—on the kitchen counter, the same one he climbed up when he was little to get at the sugar bowl. The wallet is old and stained with rainwater and sweat and grease from 11 o’clock burgers and fries. It’s stupid, but it’s for that reason he doesn’t want to get a new one. There’s a lot of fondness attached to this wallet—dropping it in the tracks on his first day of eighth grade, paying for stuff on his first date, hauling food into the apartment on game nights with his dad. He’s had this wallet for most of his life. It’s the one constant he’s got. 

An arm suddenly comes out of nowhere to wrap around his neck. The hold is tight and strong and accompanied with a booming laugh and a juvenile case of the noogies. Two fists grind against the crown of his head, telling him it’s not just his dad who’s cashing in on the fun. With a cry half choked by his own laughter, Keith tries to free himself from his family’s strange way of saying goodbye.

“Give it up!” says his father. Keith can hear the grin in his voice. They both know he’s not gonna break free. “Leaving the nest for two months, and not even a half-assed goodbye? You’re breaking my heart, Keith.”

“And mine,” adds his mother, whom he knows has her hands on her hips right now. “All those fights you got into in middle school, and you let somebody snatch you like that? What are you, three?”

To that, there’s a million things he wants to say— “It’s not that easy!” Or— “It wasn’t fair!” And the one that annoys his mom the most: “But we’re at home! And besides, it was just Dad.”

And to all that, there’s always one thing his mom returns with: “Tough. You win or you lose, and that’s that.”

There’s no winning with his mother, and since his father tends to side with her on this sort of thing, Keith’s usually on his own to figure out how to deal with his mom’s eccentric moments of intensity. For this kind of situation, in particular, it’s easy. 

Keith laughs. 

Like some infectious spell, his mother loses her frown at the sound of his laughter and starts to smile. His father, in turn, slackens the arm around his neck, and instead turns him around to crush him into a hug. With his face buried into his father’s chest, Keith feels like he’s five years old. He returns the hug the best that he can with his father’s arms secured tight around him. “Bye, Dad.”

“Stay safe out there,” says his father, as if he and his mother were about to go off to space instead of a national park conservancy.

“You too, Heath,” says his mother, reaching with a hand to squeeze his father’s hand. 

As Keith leaves the apartment, he hears his father’s low chuckle of  _ “Come here, you,” _ and hears his mother’s surprised gasp. When he gets in the car, he doesn’t say anything when it takes his mother twenty minutes to join him, and doesn’t say anything about her slightly disheveled hair and clothes. Instead, he’s scrolling through Instagram, liking Ryan’s photos of the hostel he’s staying at in Ecuador, Nadia’s food posts, Ina’s post of the Golden Gate bridge with a lengthy description, and ignoring James’ numerous selfies (except the one with the dog, because the dog was cute). 

As she gets in, his mother checks herself in the rearview mirror as she starts the car. The engine roars to life before settling for a gentle rumble, and they sit in the car together for a moment of calm, uninterrupted silence. Then, his mom starts to drive off.

“So,” Keith says, eyes glued to his phone as they turn left on Broadway, “Is letting Dad ‘snatch you up’ a win or a loss?”

His mother’s cackling laugh makes him break out in laughter. They laugh so hard, they almost crash into another car and curse out the driver together as they maneuver around each other in a deafening, honking mess filled with copious “fuck you”s and “go fuck yourself”s.

Their amusement finally dies down on the George Washington bridge, when Keith comes to a sudden alarming realization.

“I left my wallet on the counter.”

“You don’t need your wallet in the mountains.”

Keith groans and sinks into his seat.

* * *

The second his mother pulls into exit 34-A on I-90, the entire car trills with the sound of an old-school telephone. The dashboard flashes blue along with the sound, and a single name appears in white: KOLIVAN.

His uncle’s the quiet sort who lives up in the mountains, and probably the reason why his mother took up her work in forest conservation. Keith never gets to see him, except on his summer trips upstate, but he’s learned that having his uncle around is almost always like a catch-22: he’s great to have around, but he knows for a fact that what his mom calls ‘light work’ isn’t actually gonna be any ‘light work’ at all. Learning to live off the land and going around freeing animals from poacher traps like some sort of Disney protagonist sounds like a cool thing to do, but only when you don’t realize there’s about a hundred ways to die out there — and that’s only when there’s no animals around.

Movement from the corner of his eye grabs his attention. Keith sees his mother reach for the phone. 

“I got it,” Keith says.

“Wait—”

Keith hits the button to take the call. Before he can say hi, a sharp blast of static echoes through the car’s stereo system. Keith recoils instantly, his hand snapping back as if he touched a flame. A softer blast of static filters through with what sounds like a garbled voice that sounds vaguely like his uncle. Bewildered, turns to look at his mother. She looks as dumbfounded as he does.

Suddenly, his uncle’s voice roars through the speakers. “Sorry about the static—I busted my phone, so I’m using a dispatcher.”

“A what?” his mother echoes. There’s frustration seeping into her tone. “Kolivan, where are you?”

“Area 3, the east side.” Another wave of static fizzles through. Muffled is another noise, a sharp, echoing blast.

Keith freezes. His hand grips hard around the handbar of the passenger’s seat while the other balls into a fist. His whole body is on high alert, all from recognizing that sound. He’s not a stranger to it, as he hears it often with his uncle each Thanksgiving, when they go hunting for wild turkey together. He thought he’d be used to it by now, but hearing it echo off in the woods while you yourself is hunting is very different from hearing it coming from the speakers with your uncle on the other line.

His mother, as always, proves to be vastly different from himself.

“What was that?” she demands, as if she doesn’t already know. “What’s going on? Who’s there with you?” Then, after a moment, she adds, “I’m coming over there.”

The car swerves dangerously to the right, and it feels like he’s being thrown back into his seat as the entire world speeds by. Then he realizes that’s exactly what’s happening, because his mom has the car racing down the interstate at a speed fast-reaching 100. 

Keith feels his heart race faster and faster with every notch the speed gauge moves up. There are few cars on the interstate this far upstate on a weekday afternoon, but every now and then Keith sees a spot of color up ahead that disappears behind them in the blink of an eye. Keith is sure the painful thrashing in his chest is what is means to have a heart attack. After the tenth or so car they pass in this way, Keith feels apt to inform his mother that perhaps the situation they’re in is not the best example a mother should be showing her child. 

“Are you crazy?” Keith shouts at her. “Why are you taking us there? Didn’t you hear the gun? We should be calling the police, not driving  _ to _ the people with guns. And slow down! You’re gonna crash!”

“Put your seatbelt on.”

“I already have it on!”

“Good. You’ll be fine.”

“How is  _ any _ of this fine?!”

They rush past the trees lining the interstate and make it to a vast, empty landscape of lush green hills and spots of cattle. Keith is sure there are some barns in the pastures, but he can’t exactly see for himself because he’s too busy holding onto dear life and making sure they won’t crash into anything.

In a matter of minutes, they leave the hills behind for the dry plateaus that rise quickly to grow into rocking cliff-sides that flank them on either side. About three minutes into this new territory, his mother makes a vague announcement of, “Hang on.”

Hang onto what? Is the question left at the tip of his tongue, because the entire world suddenly lurches to a screeching halt. The whiplash he gets from their stop hits him so hard, he can’t breathe. The seatbelt is painful against his chest and neck, and the back of his head is already numbing with pain. As Keith finds his bearings, the world settles around him with tranquil silence. There’s an empty road to his far left, and sparse woodland sloping sharply to his right. Through the windshield, he can see that they’ve pulled over in a lane that has a metal trash can and a rusting sign post:  _ TEXT STOP—DRIVE SAFE! _

“Stay right here,” he hears his mother saying, before there’s the jangle of keys and the opening and shutting of a car door. When he finally turns his head to his left, the driver’s seat is empty and his mother is nowhere in sight.

I need to follow her, he thinks, but the empty road starts to blur through the windows of the car and the forest around him turns dark. Keith sits there in the darkness, and breathes.

He falls asleep in a matter of seconds.

* * *

It’s the sound of a marimba that wakes him up.

Keith jolts awake, opening his eyes to a red-orange light. Disoriented, he tries getting up when he realizes that he can’t. He’s strapped down, and a red light blinds him from ahead. He panics first and thinks second. Flailing, he hits his hand against something hard. He feels the earth rock, and then a shrill, high-pitched noise assaults his ears. For some reason, aliens are the first thing that comes to mind. Blindly, he gropes around to free himself and break free. He finds something near his waist and digs his thumb into it. The straps around him loosen with a familiar click. A part of him lets panic die at the familiarity of the sound. The other part wants him to get the fuck out. As he throws the strap off him, he somehow hits himself in the face with something cold and hard and sharp. 

“Fuck!” he swears, bringing his hand up to his chin. And as he sits there, holding his face, he starts to actually take a moment and think.

The first thing he realizes is that he’s in a car—in his mother’s car, to be exact. Which means that the awful noise he’s hearing is the alarm. Quickly, he reaches for the button that turns the alarm off. After a few seconds of fumbling, he finds it and presses down hard. It stops, and he lets out a sigh of relief.

The sudden silence around him brings with it an emptiness that fills the car faster than his panic overtook him. Then he remembers his mother. Immediately, Keith gets out of the car. He leaves the car open and starts to head out to the road. He thinks that’s where she went; he didn’t see where she’d run off to, but it makes sense to him that she’d gone out to the road.

When he gets out there, it’s eerie. Everything is bathed in the glowing embers of twilight, turning a common highway road and the dense woodland on the other side of it awash in strong, red and orange hues. He stares into the woods, wondering if that’s where she was headed. Was that Area 3? What even was Area 3, anyway? Was it a section of some nature preserve or a conservation agency? And what was his uncle doing that made his mom drive like mad down a highway, dump him in the middle of nowhere and just take off? Where the hell did she go? What was she doing? And, most importantly, what was taking so long?

“Mom?” Keith called out, crossing the road and turning this way and that. “Mom, are you there?” 

He feels like he’s five years old again, when he got lost the first time his parents took him hiking in the mountains. Except, back then, he’d climbed a tree without figuring out how to get down, and his parents couldn’t find him for hours because they couldn’t see him. It’s a charming memory. It also just makes him want to see his mom a whole lot more.

He goes into the woods, and looks around. The trees here are tall, with thick trunks branches heavy with dark leaves. The grass below is lush and wild, untamed and untouched, and the sound of silence comes in soft birdcalls and the gentle whisper of wind rustling through leaves.

There’s nobody here but himself.

He tries calling for her again. “Mom?”

The forest answers him in whispers.

He doesn’t try calling again.

Keith turns around and starts heading back, his loneliness twisting swiftly first to bitterness, and then to something else entirely. His mother is gone, and there’s nobody around. And as far as he knows, there hasn’t even been one car or anything going down the road. The sun is setting fast, and he doesn’t know what to do. He’s played enough games and watched enough movies to register the uncanniness of his situation, and the disturbing sense that something is off won’t leave him alone. 

He’s not sure what to do next. Does he call the cops? Does he drive around to find someplace that actually has people? What about his father, should he call his father? What should he say? That his uncle’s getting shot at and that Mom jumped off to go save him? Was he actually getting shot at, or was it something else? It sure sounded like a gunshot. Should he try calling his uncle? Or his mother! His mother would’ve taken her phone. He could call his mother. Maybe she’s already tried to call him. He vaguely remembers being woken up by the sound of his ringtone. That was his mother, probably; he’s sure of it.

He walks faster through the woods, weaving through the trees. The long grass winds tight around his ankles as he tries to rush back to the car, making him trip. It’s one of the ways he can tell just how abandoned this place is; the fact that he’s neither seen nor heard another car come by is the other. 

By the time he sees the road again, the reddish hues of dusk has mingled with the darker tones of the night. He can still see the bright red light painting the tops of the rocky cliff-sides on the side of the road he walked from, but everything down the valley has grown cold with a blue-black light. There’s no chill in the air yet, but summer nights in the mountains can only get so cold in June, so he doesn’t rush to the car. There’s no need to.

Plus, there’s someone down there—someone he doesn’t recognize.

Keith stops right where he is, partially hidden amongst the trees. He can’t see clearly from where he is, mostly because the stranger is standing on the passenger’s side and the car is in the way, but he knows it’s not his mother. 

He also knows it’s not human.

There’s a lion’s face looking out over the roof of the car, nudging along the top with its nose. It ducks for half a second, disappearing completely, and Keith sees the car rock this way and that. The lion is in the car.

What the fuck, Keith thinks, his mind blanking in fear, What the fucking fuck, what the  _ fuck— _

The lion suddenly pops his head back out, and looks up to the sky. As it starts to turn toward the rocky slope, Keith quickly realizes two things: one, the lion is not a ‘lion’ in the sense that he knowns, because the lion has broad shoulders and thick arms and a back that looks distinctly human yet not human at all; and two, the lion is sniffing the air for a scent to track, a scent that originally came from inside the car, on the side where he—

The lion looks right at him.

Blood freezes in his veins. 

Slowly, the lion moves around the car. Keith doesn’t dare to breathe, not even to gasp when the lion comes out into view, not even when he sees that it’s even less of a lion than he first thought, because the lion-man creature has the legs of a horse, and it’s holding something huge in its giant, clawed hands—something he’s seen in games; something that needs to be held out and aimed; something that sparks and glints sharply, catching light in a way that doesn’t make sense because there is no sunlight here, and because the light is glowing brighter and brighter—

Keith runs.

He takes two steps back into the forest when something hot blazes right past his ear. Half a foot to his right, the earth explodes. The blast throws him to the left, like he’s nothing but a ragdoll, and his ears fill with a loud ringing that fuels the fear blitzing ice through his veins. “Get up,” a voice screams inside his head, “Get up!” 

He scrambles on the ground, crawling and tripping through the forest as he tries to figure out where to hide in a place where every strip of land is flat and full of nothing but trees.

Suddenly, the earth shakes. A sharp, metallic scraping sounds behind him.

Stupidly, Keith looks over his shoulder. 

The lion-creature, teeth bared, is now holding a massive curved blade over its head. It swings down.

Before he can do anything, something rams painfully into his side and throws him to the ground. The swing of the sword hits the earth instead of his skull, and everything shatters. Soil flies into the air like a cloud of dust, and loose branches rain down to spear the ground around him. Something sharp hits his head and he cries out. He’s vaguely aware of voices shouting in the distance.

“Stop this!” 

“Out of my way!” 

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Don’t think I won’t cut you down, Shiro.”

“Are you mad? This is a child!”

“A child?” 

The ground shakes, and then, something comes to yank him up by the back of his hair. Keith grits his teeth hard to keep from making a sound. 

“You think  _ this _ is a child?” 

He’s forced to his knees by his hair, and Keith’s hands fly up to try and fight. One hand gets caught by the wrist in a vice-like grip and is twisted back. Keith lets a yelp of pain leave him. He figures it’s better than crying.

Above him, his assailant laughs and pulls Keith’s head back to look down at him. Up close, the lion’s face seems more beastly than animal, as its eyes are an eerie yellow and the expression not unlike that of a human. “You’ve got quite a bit of fight left in you,” the lion-centaur says, finally letting go of Keith’s hair.

His head drops down. As his head lolls forward, Keith catches a glimpse of a black horse and something distinctly human. Slowly, Keith raises his head back up.

Standing before him is the most beautiful man he’s ever seen. Broad shoulders, strong arms, and a powerful chest with pert, dusky nipples. His skin, a silken shade of warm, golden beige, is a stark contrast to the sharp blackness of his hair, both on his head and on his horse-shaped body. There’s a scar that curves over the bridge of the man’s nose that seems relatively new, the skin pink and still raw.

Curiously, this man-centaur seems to be as shocked to look upon Keith as he is with him. The man-centaur looks at him with widened eyes and parted lips, and his gaze flicks back and forth between Keith and the lion-centaur holding him captive. At long last, the man-centaur looks back at the lion-centaur and speaks again.

“Sendak.”

“Hm?”

“Let him go.” 

“Now, there’s an idea. Let the boy run a bit before I catch him again. Like a game.”

Keith reacts immediately. A strange hissing noise escapes him, foreign and alien-sounding. Adrenaline brings strength back to his arms, enough to unsettle the lion-centaur into grabbing his other arm and keep them both in place.

“Oh? It seems like this one isn’t human after all. What do you think it is, Shiro? Fae? I’ve heard there are plenty of changelings living in this region of the human realm.” 

“Sendak,” the man-centaur speaks slowly, all the while gazing upon Keith as if he’s the only thing of value in sight, “I think… I think that’s Krolia’s boy.”

The forest goes silent.

With a snarl, he’s suddenly let go. Keith hits the ground again, though he manages to break his fall this time by throwing his arms out in front of his face. When he looks up, an outstretched hand is waiting patiently before him. It’s the man-centaur. Wordlessly, Keith takes it. He marvels at the warmth that flows into him the second they clasp hands.

“Are you alright?”

Keith says nothing, because his brain has suddenly decided that he is mute and dumb.

Thankfully, his silence doesn’t deter the man-centaur. “I’m Shiro. I’m…” Suddenly, he becomes sheepish. “Well, I guess you can call me a guardian of sorts.”

Keith enjoys watching the shy smile on the man-centaur’s face. There’s a warmth in his gestures that feels genuine and charming. Keith likens it to how he felt when he was six years old, watching his father’s cookies bake in the oven for the first time—magical, and sweet.

Shiro helps him back to his feet. He stands shakily, his head heavy and spinning. The hand around his tightens slightly, and another comes to rest at his back.

“I’m feel dizzy,” Keith says, and furrows his brows because that… came out wrong. He tries to correct himself. “Feeling. I’m feeling. Dizzy.”

“Here,” says Shiro, “I’ll help you.”

Keith feels Shiro’s hands slipping away, and he vaguely hears someone whining, “No, wait—” before night falls and it’s time to go to sleep.

In the darkness, he dreams of a red lion and a brown horse fighting in a field, and a great, booming voice laughing, “So it’s true what they say! The Queen gave birth to a bastard!”

* * *

Two weeks pass, and Keith learns absolutely nothing about what happened that day. Nor does he remember most of what’s happened.

There are some things he remembers. Like his uncle’s strange phone call, and how his mother drove like mad to get somewhere. He remembers falling asleep, and waking up abruptly. He remembers lightning, and the earthquake. He also remembers a lion, and a horse, and a man.

The man is what he remembers most. He remembers the man’s voice, and his caring, gentle touch. He remembers his kindness, and the way he looked at him—like he was someone worth knowing. He can remember all that, but he can’t remember his face, nor can he remember his name.

There’s one name he does remember—Sendak. He remembers a Sendak.

Searching the internet gives him nothing. While he doesn’t remember much, Keith’s pretty sure he never met any writer or illustrator of any children’s books, and he hasn’t read any of Maurice Sendak’s books in years. On a whim, he’s even asked his uncle, who was recovering at his mother’s home after messing with an animal trap on his rounds two weeks ago.

“Sendak? Where’d you hear a name like that?”

“Dunno. Just… somewhere, I guess.”

“There’s a Maurice Sendak. Maybe you’ve learned about him at school.”

“...Uncle, I’m in high school. We don’t do picture books in high school.”

“Really? What a shame.”

His search drags on for another week before he decides to let it go. He comes to accept the fact that he wasn’t going to find anything new about the name ‘Sendak’ if there’s nothing new in the first twenty pages of a google search result, especially when you rarely have to go past the first page to find what you’re looking for on google. 

This is a conclusion he comes to as he sits on a rock in the middle of the woods, chomping away at a squashed ham-and-cheese sandwich instead of doing any of the trail maintenance work his mother had sent him out to do. He doesn’t see the point of it anyway; the trail markers are still fresh from his work last year, and there are no signs of any new paths made by wayward hikers against better judgment. There aren’t any illegally felled trees or missing plants (though, to be honest, he still can’t tell if a plant is missing or not), and there are plenty of birds to shit on his hat all morning and day long. All in all, it’s a perfectly normal day in the woods.

Keith brushes sandwich crumbs off his lap and shoves the beeswax food wrap into the pants pocket where he’d kept his sandwich. It’s a few minutes after two right now. If he stays on the trail and doesn’t find anything to log or fix up, he can probably get back to the office with enough time to go for a drive.

He doesn’t have a license (hardly anyone in the city does) but his mom taught him to drive years ago and no cops ever seem to care that his baby-face ass is driving around a tanky SUV. They probably just assume he’s got a license, what with all the other kids driving around all over the place. 

That’s the one bad thing about living this far up the state and away from the city--you gotta drive to get anywhere decent, even to get some milk or a bag of Takis. It was hell coming up here for the first time when he was in 7th grade, realizing that there was literally nothing for him to do unless his mother or his uncle had time to take him. That’s probably why his mother taught him to drive so early, so he could quit bothering her about being bored all the time.

He’s been driving around this place since he was fifteen, a year before it was actually legal for him to do so, and he’s come to know all the ins and outs of his mother’s not-city like the back of his hand. If only he knew the trails that well. That, he knows is a sentiment his mother shares, since nowadays her answer whenever he’s asks her how to get to someplace she tells him to go inspect is a quick, “Use your phone.”

Unfortunately, google maps can only get him so far. Though it’s got most of the trails logged in their system, some areas are known only to people who work here—like Area 3.

There’s a few sections of the forest reserve that’s restricted to the general public. As a child, he’s always fantasized that it’s because aliens happened to crash-land there, and that the government was using wildlife conservation work as a giant cover-up. Now, he knows the real reason isn’t quite that fun.

If there’s any species of endangered flora or fauna indigenous to a specific region or area of a forest reserve, you can bet your year’s part-time salary that it’ll be off-limits. Or, if there’s a need for extensive restoration efforts, that’ll also be a reason to mark the area as restricted. Keith’s only been to one such type of area, and it was Not Fun. There was a lot of heavy lifting involved, and a lot of picking up samples, and delivering samples, and sending test kits, and picking up test results—and emailing. There was so much emailing.

Keith figures Area 3 is housing some sort of endangered species, considering how his uncle was injured trying to stop some folks from running off with some kind of animal. He also figures it’s the only other way for him to figure out what happened two weeks ago, considering how nobody else seems to be able to give him the kind of information he wants—including where Area 3 is.

“That’s classified.”

“Mom. It’s me, Keith. I’m not gonna go hunt endangered animals or steal a flower.”

“Good. Now get back to work. There’s flooding along the western section of the red trail in Area 7, and the interns keep fucking it all up.”

“...I’m the only intern you have.”

“I know. And you keep fucking it all up. Go fix it.  _ Now.” _

He can sort-of guess where it is through process of elimination. It knows it’s somewhere close to exit 34-A, and he knows they drove west. That would make it the eastern-most area of the forest preserve, where hunting was  _ definitely _ not allowed, as it was where herds of deer flocked to during their breeding season. And if he remembers correctly, his uncle said that he was in the ‘east side,’ whatever that means, of Area 3. He’s not sure how important that is to finding out where he needs to go, but he knows better than to ignore details and decides to put that piece of info off to the side for later.

The only thing worth getting to in the eastern area was the Lyon Research Center, which he’d never visited because listening to a long-winded sphiel about the most effective methods of fighting invasive fern species was something he already gets to listen to at the dinner table, and he doesn’t particularly want to experience what it’d be like if there were more than two people blabbering away about it. A quick search of the Lyon Research Center, however, confirmed that it was close to exit 34-A on the I-90, and that the only way to get to the center was to cut through woodland that required a permit to gain access to. And while he doesn’t have a permit, his mother does. Plus, he technically doesn’t need a permit if he was only looking for the place he was at. His mother didn’t pass through any checkpoints to park where she did, so he’s pretty sure he’d be okay.

That’s what he tells himself as he leaves the forest and walks through the small parking space by the Olkari research center. His mom’s corner of the office is front and center, which he knows she has a love-hate relationship with. She doesn’t mind helping visitors out, but she hates being the first person to be seen because it means her colleagues don’t have to engage as much as she does. And, more importantly, it means she can’t slack off like the others do every now and then.

Today, there’s hardly anyone around. Ulaz is on vacation, and Anton has a class to teach at the university nearby. His mother is the only one manning the center, which means that she’s the only person available to handle any visitors.

Today, there’s only one, which is a lot less usual for the summer months. Judging from his attire, Keith figures it’s someone who’s hiked frequently, and wonders what kind of boring, mundane question his mother’s putting up with this time.

His mother surprises him by laughing. 

It’s a genuine laugh, the kind that reaches her eyes in a way that brings a warm sparkle in her eyes. It’s soft, but full in the way that you can tell she’s quite happy.

For a split second, he wonders--is he why their parents divorced?

Then, his mother spies him, and smiles. She stands. “You came right on time. Keith, I want you to meet someone. He works at the Lyon Research Center in Area 3, and he was of my former interns. We’ve worked together for a long time.”

The man turns. And Keith forgets to breathe. 

An awkward, shy smile creeps onto the man’s face as he extends a hand in greeting. “It’s… nice to see you, Keith. I’m looking forward to working with you.”

Wordlessly, Keith fits his hand into Shiro’s. When Shiro squeezes his hand, an inexplicable warmth flows into him, and almost makes him forget how to speak. 

Almost.

Keith takes in a deep breath.

“It’s nice to see you again, Shiro.”


End file.
